"It's very warm in here," I say to the friendly phlebotomist, who invites me to get comfortable in the chair as she looks for the brachial artery in my right arm. She nods her agreement. "It's because we have to draw the curtains now," she explains. "It stops the air circulating. If it's like this now, God only knows what it'll be like in the summer."

I am attending my local NHS hospital to have a routine blood test performed. The normal ritual of taking a ticket and sitting in the waiting area before a patient's number is called is still in play. However, it is all change in the windowless room where there are four padded chairs, and the same number of phlebotomists present, all of them women. This time the curtains are drawn making it difficult for patients to know where they should be heading. I try two cubicles, unintentionally disturbing phlebotomists and patients, before I find the right one. It's all quite embarrassing. I express my surprise at the clumsiness of the new arrangements. "You're not the only one," my designated phlebotomist replies. "We've had lots of complaints. It slows everything up too. People don't like it at all." Why the change, then? "A week ago we failed an inspection," she replies. "They turned up and said we had to draw the curtains around patients."

The great French sociologist Emile Durkheim was right to predict that modern, organic societies with complex forms of work and social organisation would increasingly shift from a focus on the collective to the person – "the cult of the individual," he termed it. Durkheim thought that over time modern individualism would lead to new forms of social solidarity through work and leisure. He has been proved right for the most part. But he wasn't to know what would happen when the focus on the individual led to an overzealous imposition on the associated concept of privacy in NHS hospitals.

Of course, people do want privacy if they are involved in activities or behaviours which in a public setting they might find embarrassing or shameful. Maintaining honour is a crucially important part of all social systems, traditional and modern, although, as social anthropology reveals, what activities count as embarrassing will vary significantly between different societies. And management of honour (and shame) becomes more complex in open multicultural societies like Britain where diverse groups adhering to different norms and values operate in the same social space.

Undoubtedly, there are some groups who would prefer that the venesection procedure takes place in private in order to maintain culturally appropriate modesty – for example, women from all ethnic groups who are required to remove their tops, and Muslim women who wear the veil. But at my local community-based hospital, this is already catered for. "We know what type of people need the curtains drawn, and we always offer it," said the phlebotomist.

But while some patients favour privacy, others positively welcome the communal aspect of their treatment. "We have a lot of regulars," explains the phlebotomist. "You know, people who regularly come to have their Warfarin levels checked. They know all of us and we know all of them. They like a bit of chat. So do the people who are nervous."

Ah yes, the chat. It soon becomes apparent that drawing the curtains prevents staff communicating effectively with one another. And it's not just social chat, it's technical chat as well – staff exchanging information and helping one another if, for example, a patient is about to faint or it's difficult to find a vein. It is evident that both types of overlapping exchanges are very important in terms of creating high levels of cooperation and morale within this small group of workers. In turn, this feeds through into high levels of customer satisfaction.

Long before behavioural economics became fashionable and achieved its own unit in the Cabinet Office, social anthropologists were observing and making sense of "strange" behaviours in overseas societies in Africa, Pacific islands and the Indian subcontinent. The insights these pioneers provided about the complex ways in which the different parts of a society functioned were revolutionary. They still are. But social anthropology is not just good at making sense of the unfamiliar in faraway places, but the familiar at home as well.

Speaking recently on Sky News, Lord Winston noted how few social scientists were employed in the NHS. He suggested that this contributed to a lack of joined up thinking in the organisation. I agree. The NHS and other parts of the public sector should employ some social anthropologists, experts in cultural decoding, in order to tease out the likely unintended consequences of policy changes to customary behaviour before they are implemented. That way, a lot of people – staff and patients – won't get hot under the collar.

Dr Sean Carey is a social anthropologist and visiting lecturer at the Business School, University of Roehampton